Saginaw News fileSam Marble was the first president of both Delta College and Saginaw Valley State University, but receives little recognition at either school, a Saginaw News columnist argues.

Twenty years after education pioneer Sam Marble’s death, it’s time to set his legacy in stone.

Not many of the region’s college students are familiar with Marble’s
name. But if it weren’t for the footprint he laid upon Saginaw, Bay and
Midland counties in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, it’s likely they would be
attending other schools or very different versions of today’s colleges.

Marble served as the first president of both Delta College and Saginaw
Valley State University. SVSU, in particular, owes a good deal of its
existence to Marble.

Despite his historical significance, neither institution does much to
recognize one of their most influential founders. With each passing day,
his importance fades from the public mind as fast as the yellowing
newspaper articles that document his three decades’ worth of
accomplishments here.

Either school could right that wrong, though.

SVSU has constructed walls bearing names of multimillion-dollar donors.
Delta has been less inclined to follow such a practice, but the
community college in Frankenlust Township has a number of facilities
named after contributors.

Those buildings honor important figures who gave money, but largely ignore the man who built the bank.

Outside of the Sam Marble Lecture Hall, which is tucked away inside
SVSU’s Wickes Hall, and Delta’s bronze portrait of its first leader —
hanging from a brick wall next to similar works of art depicting the
college’s other ex-presidents — Marble’s name would remain absent from
the campuses he helped envision.

Yet there are a number of buildings at both institutions that don’t bear
anyone’s name. It would be fitting, on the 20th anniversary of his
death, for either college to pay tribute to Marble by adding his name to
one of the structures that likely wouldn’t exist without him.

Marble’s impact here began in 1958, when Delta’s founders recruited him
from Wilmington, Ohio, to serve as the school’s first president.

When his vision to transform the young, two-year college into a
four-year university died, Marble and his Board of Trustees built one
from scratch in 1963 when he successfully lobbied the state to establish
a liberal arts institution just five miles down the road in Kochville
Township. He was Saginaw Valley College’s president for its first 11
years, guiding it through growing pains that had some doubting it would
survive.

“He did give a lot of people the impression that he could do anything,”
Leslie Whittaker, one of the first educators hired at SVSU, said in
2003. “He got Delta going, then he did the same at SVSU. He had gone
through all these things and been successful.”

Whittaker, at the time, was one of the university’s last remnants from
the Marble era. Whittaker died in 2008, and along with him, another link
to Marble’s dissolving legacy.

Marble’s successor as Delta’s president, Bay City’s Donald J. Carlyon,
admitted to The Saginaw News in 2004 that his onetime colleague was
“underappreciated” in mid-Michigan history. SVSU President Eric
Gilbertson, who met Marble once when the former leader returned to visit
the campus he helped found, wrote a letter to the faculty after Marble
died of a heart attack in 1990. It reads:

“He was by all testimony something of a dreamer, something of an
idealist, something of an inventor, even a radical,” Gilbertson wrote.
“No one can say that his passing this way did not matter. It mattered a
great deal.”

And it still matters.

Many of those who understand Marble’s impact know so because they met
the man or worked with him. Unfortunately, that progeny one day will
pass the higher education baton on to those whose familiarity with
Marble is limited to that bronze portrait or the nameplate outside that
lecture hall.

Marble deserves more than that. So, as this fall semester begins at
Delta and SVSU, leaders at both schools should remind the next
generation of pupils of those who came before them ... by finding a way
to finally honor the man whose vision made it all possible.